by Rose Doyle
I'd tried to keep my moaning quiet. But my grandmother, always afraid disaster would strike without her knowing, slept with one ear open. She still kept to the bed she'd shared with Mary Ann.
I couldn't lie myself where my sister had died so my bed now was in a corner of the big room behind curtains.
'It's my time of the month,' I said. It was the first lie that came to mind. It was also what I wanted to be true.
'You'd be better off getting out of the bed then,' my grandmother said, 'lying there won't do you a bit of good. I'll make you a cup of sweet tea.
When she left I swung my legs on to the floor and sat on the side of the bed. This made me feel worse so I lay back against the pillows. I wanted to die, both because of the way I felt and because I knew what was happening to me.
My grandmother was crusty enough when she came back. 'It'll pass, we’ve all had to put up with the same thing in our time. Drink the tea and get out of the bed and clean the fireplace for your mother.'
The nausea rose inside me again when I took the cup from her. I lay back quickly, leaning against the wall as I sipped. My grandmother stood for a minute watching me. I told myself, as I thanked her and put a reassuring smile on my face, that the look on her face wasn't suspicion.
'You don't usually get it so bad,' my grandmother said.
'No,' I said. 'But I'm feeling better now.'
She left me alone at last. I lay wondering what on God's earth I was going to do about the child I was surely carrying.
I waited until my mother had left for work before getting up. My father wouldn't rise much before midday so I didn't worry about him. I slowly dressed and had more tea and decided on the first thing to be done.
The nausea was less, or maybe I was getting used to it, by the time I turned into North King Street. At Beezy Ryan's kip house the window drapes were closed tight. The front-door knocker, shaped like a lion's paw, echoed like the knell of doom when I dropped it.
It was fully five minutes before a thin woman with long, white-gold hair opened the door. In the murky light of the hallway she looked to me beautiful. I asked for Beezy.
'She's in her bed,' the woman looked me up and down, 'she needs her sleep. It's not yet eight o'clock. Come back another time.'
'I'll wait.' I pushed past her into the hallway.
I'd never been inside Beezy's house before and was surprised at the style. It wasn't elegant in the way of the Shelbourne Hotel, or even like the Buckleys' house. But it had style nonetheless.
The walls were wine-coloured and bordered with gold. Along one side there was a wine-coloured chaise stacked with gold cushions. Bright rugs covered the floor and a heavy, green velvet curtain half concealed an arch near the stairs. The silence, deep as any grave, was a surprise to me too.
And it was warm in Beezy Ryan's house, as if fires had been burning in the rooms until the small hours of the morning.
'You've seen enough now so get out of here!' The woman who'd opened the door stood blocking my way. Her beauty was twisted by the fury on her face. 'Get out or by God I'll put you out and you won't like that . . .'
'Leave her be, Mary.' Beezy's voice came before her as she stepped from behind the velvet curtain. She stood looking at me, dressed in a red kimono with a black embroidered dragon circling her neck.
'You must need the job badly to be calling this early, Sarah,' she said slowly, 'or is there some other reason you're here?'
The woman called Mary folded her arms. She didn't try to stop me when I walked toward Beezy.
'I want to talk to you on your own,' I said.
'We'll go into the parlour,' Beezy gave a short laugh, 'it's where I carry out most of my interviews.' She cocked her head to one side. 'I've seen you looking better, Sarah. Are you not well?'
A crash from upstairs, followed by a string of curses and then silence, saved me from answering. No one in the hallway said anything. Maybe such sounds were so everyday no one heard them but me. I felt the palms of my hands damp. I rubbed them along the sides of my cloak.
The nausea was gone but I was shaking, both with worry and fear about my state and what I was going to do.
'Put the kettle on, Mary,' Beezy said, 'and make tea when it boils.'
'I'm going back to my bed.' The other woman was surly. 'She's no business here at this hour of the morning.'
'I've already had tea,' I said.
'Put the kettle on, Mary.' Beezy repeated this in a way that brought a chill into the air. She didn't look at the woman, just turned away, beckoning me to follow her, and opened the first door we came to. 'Wait in here,' she said.
Beezy liked dragons, no doubt about it. The walls were covered in dragon wallpaper, and a second chaise longue, this one bright red, was piled with dragon cushions. The easy chairs, though, were pink with flowers. A deck of cards lay spread on a table alongside a near-empty whiskey bottle. Gas lamps spluttered weakly on either side of the mirror over the mantelpiece. The curtains were closed.
All of this I saw while Beezy, in the hallway, spoke in a low, hard voice to the woman called Mary. There was a short silence and then Beezy followed me into the room.
'That's the Mary Adams I told you about,' Beezy said, 'she has her good days and her bad days but all of her mornings are contrary.' She sighed and shook her head. 'Of late, anyway.' She sat at the table and began shuffling the cards. 'Now tell me what's wrong with you.'
'I'm with child.' I hesitated. 'I think.'
Beezy spread the cards for a game of patience. 'When did you last bleed?'
'I'm not sure. I've never been very regular.'
'You must have some idea.' Beezy didn't look at me.
'It could be two months ago.'
'What else?'
'I'm sick in the mornings. I feel tired most of the time.'
'Are you showing?'
Beezy looked at me at last. With the bad light and closed curtains it was hard to see her face clearly. Her voice held curiosity, nothing more. It was said that Beezy 'helped' her girls when they fell pregnant. It was likely she thought I'd come to her for the same kind of assistance.
'Is there a swelling of your belly?' she asked.
'No.' My clothes weren't any tighter.
'Tell me about the father.' Beezy, frowning, went back to the cards. 'Where is he and what can you expect from him? Will he stand by you?'
'He'll stand by me all right, once he knows.'
She played the cards while I told her about the Curragh and how Jimmy and I had spoken of marriage. At the end of it I said, 'Does it seem to you, Beezy, that I'm with child?'
'You know well enough yourself that you're with child, Sarah,' she sighed, 'and I knew it too as soon as I saw you in the hallway.' She swept the cards together then and, with a bigger sigh still, stacked them.
So that was it, then. I was carrying Jimmy Vance's child. Beezy was never wrong about such things. It was known that she could tell just by looking at a woman whether or not she was in the family way. Could tell too how far gone she was by laying her hands on the swelling.
I sat on a chair at the other side of the table and tried not to weep. It was too late for that.
'It would be better for you, Sarah, to face the truth of things from the beginning.' Beezy began unplaiting her hair, her rings flashing with the speed of her fingers. 'If your soldier is gone to the Curragh then you might as well forget him. I don't care that he promised you marriage, that he was kindness itself, whatever it was made you dote on him. He's a soldier and an Englishman and he's had his way with you and if they hadn't sent him to the Curragh he'd have flown anyway. The army won't be kind to you either. It doesn't like its soldiers marrying.' She began on the second plait. 'Married men are harder to move around and once they've children they're less keen to fight in wars.'
'You're right about the army, and it's a problem I'll have to face another day,' I said, 'but you're wrong about Jimmy.'
She didn't, and couldn't, know how it was between us.
'
I'm not a fool,' I went on. 'It doesn't matter that he's a soldier. Nor that he's English. He is what he is as I am what I am and we love one another.'
‘A woman’s likely to be left lonely and alone by any man,' Beezy shook her head, 'but a soldier's the quickest of all to be on his way. How will you tell him?'
'I'll write to him. Today. Then I'll follow him to the Curragh. He'd want me to . . .'
I stopped when Beezy shook her head. 'I never thought this would happen to you, Sarah Rooney. Of all the girls in Henrietta Street I thought you would be the one to escape.' She shook out her unplaited hair. It fanned across her shoulders like a bush. 'Poor Sarah.'
I might have wept then if the door hadn't been opened by Mary Adams. She brought with her a tray on which there was a cup, teapot, milk and sugar. She put the lot on the table and filled the cup with tea.
When she handed it to me without milk or sugar I took it and thanked her.
'First things first.' Beezy got glasses from a cabinet and opened the bottle of whiskey. 'It's too early for me to have tea.' She half filled one of the glasses with whiskey. 'You'll need a glass of this too, my girl, to help straighten your thinking if we're to plan what you'll do with yourself.'
With the whiskey in her hand she went to the window and pulled open the curtains. The morning had brightened enough to light up the room. Everything was changed, utterly. The dragons on the wallpaper were torn and unhappy-looking, the pink easy chairs had more stains than flowers, the table was stained.
Only Mary Adams, moving about the room like an aimless shadow in her calico night robe, was still beautiful.
I'd never before seen Beezy without rouge and eye kohl and it was a shock to me to see how girlish she looked still. Her skin was clear and a scattering of freckles made her look even younger. Her eyes, without the pencilled brows above them, had a wide-eyed look that could have been mistaken for innocence.
She finished the whiskey in two gulps and poured herself another. 'You can go back to bed now, Mary,' she said.
'I'll stay,' said Mary Adams.
'You'll go to bed.' Beezy put the glass down on the table. 'There's a lot I want you to do later in the day. We've a Friday night ahead of us. Go now.' She stared down the other woman who, for a minute, looked mutinous. Then she shrugged and turned away.
'I'll go to my room,' she muttered 'I'll leave my door open. That way I'll hear if you want me for anything.'
'I won't want you, Mary. Sarah is a friend.'
Mary Adams, on her way out of the room, gave me a look both hostile and poisonous. I shivered.
'She's jealous. Pay no heed to her,' Beezy said. 'She's the woman whose ring I retrieved in the pawn. The unfortunate creature had a terrible time of it with a father who beat and abused her and a husband who did worse. I came on her in the street one night, more dead than alive. She works fine here and most of the time she's happy enough.'
She finished her whiskey, put the glass beside the other on the table and filled a good measure into each of them.
'Mary's like a guard dog around me but I'm hoping she'll get over it.' She held one of the glasses out to me. 'To the wages of sin,' she laughed, 'which aren't death at all in the case of a woman, but life.'
'I didn't think of it as sin.' I took the whiskey and sipped. My tongue and throat burned as it went down. I felt warmer inside too. 'I wasn't ashamed either. What we did was natural, and right.'
'Of course it was,' Beezy was impatient, 'but it was a sin nevertheless in the eyes of God and the Church. Do you think having a fondness for a man transforms what you did? It was fornication, Sarah, and you might as well give it its name and be done with it, now you're going to have to live with the consequences.'
She leaned forward, looking at me. 'Will you go to term with this child? Have you thought about doing away with it?'
'I have not!' I shouted at her, then took another drink of whiskey. All it did was bring a chilly moisture to my forehead. 'How could you ask me such a thing . . .'
'I ask because I know more about the world than you do,' Beezy replied harshly. 'I know what's ahead of you, how your child will drain and drag the life out of you and how you'll be made an old woman before you're thirty caring for him. And for what? Your child will be no better off than you are, Sarah, because, when all's said and done, you won't be able to give him anything more than you got yourself. You'll be poor forever, Sarah, and your child will be poor.'
'It won't be like that. I'll be with Jimmy and we'll rear our child together. Maybe even in England, or India. He'll have his army pay.' I finished the whiskey and stared into the empty glass. 'My baby might be a girl.'
'Boy or girl it'll all be the same,' Beezy was gentler, 'and if your soldier doesn't stick by you you'll need to think on all that I've said.'
'He'll stick by me,' I told her.
'Whether he does or not you'll need work and money.' Beezy became brisk. 'Are you coming to work for me?' She looked around the tawdry room. 'You can see I need someone.'
'I don't know yet,' I said. 'I haven't said anything about it to my mother or father.'
'There's a lot you've to tell them then,' Beezy said, 'and I don't envy you. Your father and grandmother will have you on the streets as soon as they know your situation so you might as well get out before that happens. I've offered you honest work. You can live and rear your child in this house. There's a free room beside the kitchen, at the back. My girls would be kind to a child among them.'
They would too, I knew that. Beezy meant to be kind. I knew that too. She would also get hard and honest work out of me. But living in Beezy's house would mean my child growing up to be reviled by the poor and despised by the rich.
'I'll be a soldier's wife,' I said, 'and the army will look after my child.' It must have been the whiskey made me so sure.
I wrote to Jimmy Vance that day, telling him he was to be a father and that I would come to the Curragh camp as soon as he made arrangements. I went with the letter to the General Post Office in Sackville Street. The clerk assured me that it would be in Kildare the following day. The return post was just as speedy, he said.
I expected an answer from Jimmy by Wednesday, at the latest.
The sickness continued every morning. I got up very early and made sure the worst had passed before facing my mother and grandmother.
While I waited to hear from Jimmy Vance, Allie wrote to me that we should meet. Afraid I would betray my secret to her I wrote back that I was unwell and anyway was busy looking for work. When she didn't reply to this I knew she was hurt. There was nothing I could do about it, then.
There was no letter from Jimmy by Wednesday so I wrote again. Five days later, when I still had not heard from him, I began at last to face the fear, growing inside me along with our child, that Jimmy didn't want either of us.
I became truly deranged, going quite mad with a terrible, sad loneliness that caused me physical pain. It tore at my insides and left me unable to feel or think about anything but that Jimmy Vance had deserted me. This was the worst of all to bear, much harder than the knowledge that I was ruined.
On a dark morning, with the rain beating like knife blades against the window, I awoke full of desperate thoughts. As I made my way down the stairs to the privy in the yard there seemed to me only one solution in the world possible.
Beezy was businesslike when I told her what I wanted to know.
'Be careful with the amount,' was her only word of warning, 'about half a teaspoon in a cup of water is all you need. No more.' She looked away. 'I've seen what happens when women try to make sure by overdoing the dose. There's no good taking two lives . . .' She turned and held me against her for a fierce, brief moment. I promised to be very careful.
I crossed the town to an apothecary in Blessington Street. He sold me a bottle of ergot without question. I lied anyway and told him it was for one-sided headaches. He was an old man and said he found it good for such pain himself.
I waited that night until my mother,
father and grandmother were well asleep before taking myself with the ergot and a cup of water down to the yard behind the house. A navy-blue sky was full of stars and the ground crackled with frost under my feet. So did the washing, hanging stiff on lines as I crossed to the privy.
I leaned against the outside wall, out of sight of the windows of the house, and measured a half-teaspoon into the cup. Then, very quickly, I drank the lot. The church bells of St Saviour's were ringing for midnight as I put the cup down and began to walk about the yard. I knew that I could burn in hell's fire for all eternity for what I was doing. That my dead child would be consigned to limbo and denied the joy of seeing the face of God.
I would devote my life to praying for forgiveness.
I knew too, from other women who had done what I was doing, that my baby would pass from me in blood and sickness. For this reason I needed to be near the privy and had to hope that the other tenants would use their chamber pots for the night. The bitter cold made the chances of this happening more than good. That and the fact that the people of the tenements valued their night's sleep. They needed it.
There was a deathly quiet after the bells stopped. And a stillness. The yard might have been a cemetery, the low-hanging, frozen sheets headstones in the moonlight. I knew it was the morbidity of my mind made me see things this way but the images persisted as I walked between the sheets and held my mother's heaviest shawl tight about me.
I knew very quickly that the ergot was doing its work. I became full of an anxiety, then a panic that made me want to scream. I stuffed my fist into my mouth and walked in wider circles and more quickly until a drowsiness came over me that not even the icy air could penetrate.
My heart was beating loudly in my ears when the cramps began in my stomach, slicing and hot as if a malignant, knife- wielding creature was at work inside me. I doubled over so as to hold myself together, to stop myself being torn asunder. Vomit rose and subsided in me and the pain went on, an unnatural thing. I wanted to stretch myself and just lie on the frozen stone and clay of the yard. I might have done it too had it not been for the sickness, which I was afraid would choke me.
